Social deficits are life long problems for children with Autism (ASD), yet few effective treatment sexist. Almost none of the interventions commonly used to improve children's peer relations have used parents to aid the generalization of skills taught or have focused on the development of best friends. Parent Assisted Children's FriendshipTraining (CFT) is a 12 week outpatient based treatment which teaching children with friendship problem show popular and accepted children handle key situations. Parents are integrated into treatment through collateral sessions that teach them how to monitor their child's interaction with peers and develop their child's social network.The plan is to diagnose children meeting criteria for ASD. Subjects will be evaluated for the presence of specific behaviors interfering with peer acceptance (e.g., loud talking, public nose picking). Subjects having these behaviors will begiven individual behavioral programs for 4 weeks during the beginning of treatment. All subjects will be assigned randomly to one of two groups of 50 subject seach: CFTor Wait list (WL). Specificaims of the project are to assess the short-term impact of CFT vs. WL upon: (1) teacher report and behavioral play observation of peer interaction, (2) parent report of best friendships and (3) child report of self-esteem, loneliness and friendship quality, and (4) to test variables which may predict treatment response. Likely candidate variables measure the child's deviant and adaptive behavior and social comprehension at baseline. This is one of three projects in the Program Project designed to study individual differences in response to treatment.Thetreatment content focuses on communication (both verbal and nonverbal) that is instrumental in forming friendships. ProjectsV (Casari) andVI (Frankel) will test predictor variables over a wider array of treatment possibilities. For instance, variables predicting nonresponse in project V may predict response in project VI.